TONY HETHERINGTON: You can complain to the crook, bank tells victim of Google Wallet van fraud

Tony Hetherington is Financial Mail
on Sunday's ace investigator, fighting readers corners, revealing the
truth that lies behind closed doors and winning victories for those who
have been left out-of-pocket. Find out how to contact him below.

D. R. writes: I have been advised by Action Fraud to contact you. I was interested in purchasing a 2008 Volkswagen Transporter van that was advertised. The seller stated he was currently living in Cadiz, in Spain, and needed to sell as the van was right-hand drive.

He said we would use the Google Wallet service, so that once I deposited the payment the vehicle would be shipped to me for inspection, and the cash only released once I was satisfied.

I transferred the £4,000, but later that day I did an internet search and found the sale was a scam and that the seller had cloned the real Google Wallet website.

I contacted my bank, Lloyds, but the money had already gone to the fraudster’s account with Barclays. Lloyds tried to recall it but Barclays has said there is nothing it can do as I had authorised the transfer and I should be more careful.

Man with a van: The fraudster
claims to be selling a van from Cadiz

When I started making enquiries, I found
a remarkable number of advertisements offering Volkswagen vans, all
with the same tale about selling cheaply because the right-hand drive
was unsuitable for Cadiz.

The seller uses the name Aron Rankin and sometimes says he has moved to Portugal rather than Spain, but he always reassures buyers that their money will be held by an escrow service such as Google Wallet, which will mean he cannot touch the cash until the buyer is happy.

He has been operating this scam for at least two years. Apart from the fact that no official action has been taken to stop the fraudster, what is doubly depressing is the attitude of the banks.

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It is not as if your £4,000 disappeared into the vaults of some obscure offshore institution. It went to sort code 20-29-41, account number 20 91 19 33, which is a genuine Barclays account.

Your own bank, Lloyds, told me: ‘While we did try to retrieve the money from Barclays, the funds had already been withdrawn so it would not refund the monies to Mr R’s account.’

You should complain to the crook, Lloyds told me, and if necessary tell the police. Good luck with that!

Barclays told me it always asks for proof of identity when an account is opened, but that fraudsters ‘present genuine identification and verification documents (or high quality replicas that pass standard detection methods) and Barclays has no way of knowing that they will use the account for fraudulent purposes’.

On the day you sent your £4,000, it arrived in the Barclays account at 12.17pm. By the time Lloyds contacted Barclays at 3.40pm on the same day, almost all your cash had been withdrawn.

There was £102 left, which Barclays has now sent to you, together with £100 as a goodwill payment from the bank itself.Barclays also told me victims should report the fraud to the police.

Fine, assuming the police will accept the fraud report in the first place and not dismiss you with the classic line that ‘it’s a civil matter sir, see your solicitor’.

But this does not explain why so many vehicle sale scams involve accounts at Barclays. Has Barclays become a soft touch as far as opening an account is concerned?

Without too much effort, I found reports of well over a dozen identical frauds, all using accounts at Barclays. Perhaps the bank should put more effort into spotting those high quality fake ID papers – or are other banks just as vulnerable, I wonder?

Tax collector speeds up its act on unjust benefits bill

Mrs J. J. C. writes: I am at my wits’ end with Revenue & Customs. Last year I informed the Revenue that there was a problem with my tax. It conceded that it had applied someone else’s National Insurance number to my tax calculations.

It did not know why it did it, however it did it and although it is not my fault I am now to be penalised to the tune of £460 in tax said to be owed.

Your employer offers a medical benefits scheme that counts as a taxable job perk. This is always properly declared to the Revenue and in the year 2012-13 it was said to be worth £1,529.

However, for reasons that are not clear, your name was linked to another employee’s National Insurance number. That employee’s medical benefits were valued at only £370.

The mix-up was spotted, but the Revenue said that ‘rather than investigate this at the time’, this was treated as an amended benefits figure for you. In short, the taxman knew something was wrong, but did nothing about it.

Your tax was cut to reflect the lower benefits figure, leaving you facing a bill for £460. The bill is correct of course, but demanding payment is unjust.

I asked Revenue HQ to intervene and it acted very speedily.

‘This is not the level of service we aim to provide,’ it told me. ‘We will not ask for this tax due.’

The £460 has been written off, and by the time you read this you will have received £100 from the taxman by way of apology.

You’re in luck - your will is safe

Mrs A. T. writes: We made our wills in good faith with a firm called Capital Wills, based in Telford, Shropshire, and for the past 14 years we have paid storage fees. Now we have bought a safe for our valuable papers, so we wrote to obtain our wills. However, our letter to Capital Wills has been returned, marked ‘gone away’.

There are a number of businesses with similar names, so to be clear, you were dealing with Capital Wills Professional Consultants and a member of the Society of Will Writers named Geoff Fletcher.

According to Companies House, there is no limited company of this name. I tried both phone numbers you were given all those years ago, but one is dead and the other seems to be linked to a computer or fax.

However, you are in luck. Whatever happened to Geoff Fletcher and his firm, I have found that your wills ended up in the safe hands of the Society of Will Writers itself. If you contact its custody department on 01522 699710, you can claim them back.

I thought I was paying ground rent for my home, not the whole street

Ms P. T. writes: I bought my home ten years ago and every six months since then I have received demands for ground rent. I thought the numbers at the top of the letters were some sort of reference, but it now appears they are house numbers. I have written to the freehold owner, the Compton Group, and have phoned to talk about the problem but I am getting nowhere.

Fortunately, the ground rent is not a lot of money, but it must have come as a shock to find that the reference 5/17 on the letters meant you had been paying the ground rent for all houses in your road numbered 5 to 17!

Compton Group is a family-run property business in Swansea. After you queried the demands you received an email cutting your ground rent to less than £2. But this was followed by a letter

threatening legal action and extra costs if you did not pay the original bill for your own house and all the neighbouring properties as well. The company’s solicitor Peter Burgess explained to me that Compton bought a number of freeholds in your road in 2008, after the death of the previous owner, but something went wrong with the registration of the ownership at the Land Registry. The result was that your name appeared in the firm’s books as if you owned a row of houses.

Compton is sending you a refund of £67 while it corrects the Land Registry details and sorts out who owes what.

If
you believe you are the victim of financial wrongdoing, write to Tony
Hetherington at Financial Mail, Room 301, 2 Derry Street, London W8 5TS
or email tony.hetherington@mailonsunday.co.uk. Because of the high
volume of enquiries, personal replies cannot be given. Please send only
copies of original documents, which we regret cannot be returned.